The mobile telephone and/or other small portable devices (such as PDAs) are now enabled for user access to, for example, the World Wide Web, driven by the Wireless Application Protocols (WAPs). As a result there is now consumer expectation that such devices will enable access to services or applications, for example the internet, in much the same way as can be achieved with a desktop personal computer.
Further, many of these devices are multi-sensory, primarily visual and aural, through allowing input and output interaction by use of a limited viewable area and a limited keyboard or a stylus with pointing and gesture capabilities, and by use of audio techniques (voice in or out). For example, consider a mobile telephone. The user may be looking at the viewable area and controlling the device through the keys when dialling, searching the address book, interacting with text messages, playing a game, or surfing the net. Similarly, the user may be using the mouthpiece and earpiece when conducting verbal communication. Also, in either case, the other sense may be participating in a secondary manner. For example, the user may be looking at the viewable area and also hearing information by way of a connected button earpiece.
However, one difficulty associated with this type of use occurs when there are bandwidth capacity constraints for communications between a device and the server which provides the services or applications in use by the device. For example the server may have data of different types to send to the multi-sensory device which requires, for timely delivery, more bandwidth than is available on the communication channel. In this situation the server may send data to the device which, from the aspect of the user, does not make effective use of the bandwidth available, for example by sending video data when the device is only being used aurally.
Note that U.S. 2002/0081972 to Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V. discloses adding an additional field to inquiry messages sent from a mobile device, the additional field containing personal data of a user. The personal data provides information which relates to the user, such as gender, music tastes, sports interests, etc. and these are used to decide the type of information to send to the user. However this does not address the problem of making effective use of the bandwidth available for communication with the device.